As Alexander Mackendrick receives a BFI retrospective, Marc Lee looks
over the director’s career from 'The Ladykillers’ to 'Sweet Smell of
Success’
.

It’s a long way from the wild, windswept beauty of the Outer Hebrides to the sleazy, subterranean jazz joints of downtown Manhattan, yet these were the settings for the two finest films in the career of Alexander Mackendrick, a giant of mid-century cinema.

Whisky Galore! is the story of a remote island community that can’t believe its luck when a ship carrying 50,000 cases of Scotch runs aground a few yards offshore, while Sweet Smell of Success explores the darkly symbiotic relationship between a desperate press agent and an amoral but hugely powerful Broadway columnist. Released in 1949 and 1957 respectively, the films bookend the key creative period of Mackendrick’s career, years that also saw him direct The Ladykillers and The Man in the White Suit, both, like Whisky Galore!, among the best-loved Ealing comedies.

As is the case with so many filmmakers, Mackendrick’s seemingly disparate works offer revealing similarities on closer inspection. There is, for instance, a high alcohol content in Whisky Galore! and Sweet Smell of Success – perhaps surprising, given their creator’s background. While shooting his directorial debut, his strict, Calvinistic view of life reportedly left him bemused by the idea of the islanders’ questionable morality (and their considerable thirst).

Mackendrick was born 100 years ago in Boston, Massachusetts, the year after his parents had emigrated from their native Glasgow. His father died in the influenza epidemic that followed the First World War, and shortly afterwards the six-year-old Sandy was sent to live in Scotland with his grandfather. He never saw his mother again.

It was, he later reflected, an unhappy upbringing, and in much of his work childhood and the loss of innocence are major themes. Two films from the Sixties are particularly poignant in this respect.

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Set during the Suez Crisis of 1956, Sammy Goes South (1963) opens with a terrifying sequence in which the titular 10-year-old hero is caught up in a bombing raid on Port Said that kills both his parents. Almost the last thing his mother says to him is: “You’re not a baby any more”, and suddenly this is truer than he could have imagined as he sets out to walk the length of the continent to South Africa, to find an aunt he has never met.

Two years later, Mackendrick made A High Wind in Jamaica, another film about (though emphatically not for) children; and about, once more, separation. It is the 1870s, and five siblings are put on a ship by their parents, who are anxious that they should be schooled in England. En route, the children fall into the hands of pirates.

There’s plenty of hearty, roaring laughter from Anthony Quinn and James Coburn as the buccaneers, but this is less a swashbuckling romp than an unsettling study of the power the children gradually assert over their captors, in particular the vaguely sensual relationship between Quinn’s grizzled old sea dog, Chavez, and the eldest girl, Emily, played by 11-year-old Deborah Baxter. (Notably, the film also features the first – and, so far, only – big-screen performance by future best-selling author Martin Amis, then aged 16.)

Childhood and separation – or, more precisely, isolation – are also at the heart of the only non-comedy Mackendrick made at Ealing. Mandy (1952) is the tear-jerking story of a six-year-old whose deafness threatens to break up her parents’ marriage. Characteristically, the director coaxes a touching performance from Mandy Miller in the title role, and the film won a Special Jury prize at the Venice Film Festival.

But, if Mackendrick’s career and, indeed, his life were overshadowed by unhappy personal memories, it is his comedies that he is remembered for. None of them, however, is a straightforward laugh-fest. The whimsy of Whisky Galore! is tempered by the humiliation heaped on the local Home Guard captain (Basil Radford), and The Ladykillers (1955) is essentially about a rough bunch of gangsters intent on whacking a little old dear.

Elsewhere, The Man in the White Suit (1951), which has been digitally restored to mark Mackendrick’s centenary and forms part of a BFI retrospective, wears its satire on its sleeve. When an eccentric inventor, played by Alec Guinness, develops a fabric that never gets dirty and never wears out, manufacturers and trades unions are terrified by the threat it poses to their industry and their jobs. It’s a comedy, certainly, but threaded through with seriousness.

After the Ealing years, Sweet Smell of Success was Mackendrick’s first Hollywood movie. He found working within the studio system difficult, and only a handful of projects followed. The last of these was Don’t Make Waves (1967), a comedy in which Tony Curtis immerses himself in Californian hedonism; Mackendrick himself said it was “a humiliation even to have to talk about it”.

However, this did not send him into an early, embittered retirement. Instead, he reinvented himself as a teacher of film theory, after being offered the deanship of the film school at the California Institute for the Arts (CalArts). He held the position for a decade and continued teaching until shortly before his death, aged 81, in December 1993.

He had no regrets about leaving filmmaking behind, and, according to his widow, Hilary, his last 10 years at CalArts were his most fulfilling; his skills, she said, were more suited to teaching than directing anyway. Which is utterly remarkable given that, at his best, Alexander Mackendrick was among the most accomplished, insightful and wonderfully entertaining directors of his era.

An Alexander Mackendrick retrospective is at the BFI until Nov 30 (020 7928 3232; bfi.org.uk). 'The Man in the White Suit’ is out on DVD and Blu-Ray on Nov 19